Music genres showcase the wide range of language use, offering rich ground for linguistic studies. Recently, song lyrics, in particular, have gained attention due to their reflection on the socio-c...

On June 29, 2019, Carola Rackete docked the rescue ship Sea-Watch 3 on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa, in defiance of a ban imposed by Italy's Interior Minister Matteo Salvini. The migrants rescued by the Sea-Watch 3 had been blocked at sea for the previous two weeks, making it to international headlines and sparking a heated debate around sovereignty and humanitarianism in the face of the European migration crisis. On her arrival, Rackete was arrested for refusing to obey a military (...) vessel and aiding illegal immigration.This paper investigates social media and international news discourses around the Sea-Watch 3 docking, to be regarded as a critical incident capable of catalysing attention and generating a significant media resonance. Results show how both social and traditional media contributed to the proliferation of misogynous attacks against Captain Rackete, at the intersection between right-wing populist discourses of Italian ‘sovranism’ and European anti-immigrationism. By triangulating the role of the media, intersectional hostility and populist ideology, this paper sheds light on how these three factors feed into each other in the discursive construction of the ‘Fortress Europe’ of present times. (shrink)

Shadow education, or supplementary private tutoring, has expanded to become a multi-billion-dollar industry worldwide, capitalising on the desires of parents and their children to succeed and excel in education. In doing so, shadow education draws upon and reproduces cultural capital represented by knowledge, skills and educational credentials and symbolic capital constituted in the prestige, privilege and legitimacy of educational achievement. The study on which this article is based adopts a critical discourse analytic approach to examine the websites of five leading (...) private tuition centres in Singapore as seen through the lens of Bourdieu’s concept of capital. The aim is to identify specific forms of cultural capital, examine how they are harnessed for promotional purposes, and show how this reflects and reproduces the forms and representations of educational achievement and success valued in Singapore. Findings offer a deeper understanding of the marketing discourse of shadow education that pivots on the quality of private tutors, success beyond examinations and school, and concrete representations of social distinction and achievement. More significantly, the study contributes to research situated at the nexus of shadow education and Bourdieu’s concept of capital to shed light on how shadow education reflects and magnifies broader socio-cultural orientations and socio-economic structures. (shrink)

This article applies Bakhtinian dialogism and the idea of centripetal and centrifugal forces in struggle to critical discourse studies to analyse how powerful and marginalised discourses are brought into competition in political language to justify paradigm changes. I analyse German chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Zeitenwende (‘watershed’) speech, which he gave as a response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, announcing a radical armament programme and change in foreign policy, paradigm shifts that had previously been unthinkable in German politics. Based on a (...) qualitative analysis using the Appraisal Theory strategies Attitude and Engagement, I identify how Scholz aligns himself with particular powerful discourses, centring some and marginalising others, to construct an existential threat for Germany and a ‘watershed’ moment, a new situation which casts his policies of armament as without alternative. I use a dialogic approach to analyse how the speech responds to and anticipates past (already-spoken) and future (not-yet-spoken) discourses, to position itself both in terms of the immediate and the historical function of a policy statement. The paper demonstrates the strength of Bakhtinian analysis of how utterances are shaped by past and envisaged future uses of particular discourses and of dialogically contractive and expansive strategies in critical discourse studies. (shrink)

This paper argues that the proliferation of the new term ‘baby man’ has an impact on reconstructing established gender relationships and resisting China's authoritarian political power in a highly-censored online environment. This study employs feminist critical discourse analysis to investigate how Chinese feminism adopts the discursive construction of ‘baby man’ and how they echo the complex historical and sociocultural backgrounds through a case study of 43 posts containing ‘baby man’ on Chinese social media. The finding suggests that the term ‘baby (...) man’ is employed in discursive strategies, namely, double irony, the blunt resistance against both gender and power relationships that deconstruct the heteropatriarchal gender norm through the mother – son female gaze and contempt for the nation's past and current population policy. It argues that despite perennial censorship, these three discursive strategies help reconstruct the extant gender hierarchy backed by conservative Confucianist ethics and represent a grassroots challenge to the political authoritarianism indoctrinated by the state. (shrink)

This study compares the coverage of coping strategies and emotions portrayed in news regarding COVID-19 by The New York Times in the U.S. and People’s Daily of China via social media. By employing corpus assisted discourse analysis to scrutinize the text corpora, our study uncovered prominent keywords and themes. Findings indicate that a comprehensive range of themes relating to coping strategies was more common in People’s Daily while a relatively smaller number of themes was apparent in The New York Times. (...) In terms of emotions exhibited in the news coverage, positive emotions such as cheer, gratitude, and good wishes predominated in People’s Daily whereas in The New York Times, negative emotions in the form of fears and anxiety were salient. The differences are explained with reference to the political context intertwined with the news environment and prior experiences in handling epidemics, with practical implications. (shrink)

This paper analyses the discourse surrounding a high-profile sexual assault case in South Korea. While most research on language and sexual violence has focused on the media portrayal or online resistance movement, not much has focused on the language and the law. Using Critical Discourse Analysis and rhetoric, this present paper seeks to show the importance of value of paying closer attention to legal decision-making process, showing how this can make a significant contribution to the literature. The analysis reveals two (...) distinctive discourses at work. One is that victims must embody and display certain characteristics as a ‘pure and destroyed’ individual in order to avoid being dismissed or appearing untrustworthy. The second is that the perpetrators represent themselves as victims seeking to makes it the goal of the court to protect the perpetrators’ rights, rather than those of the victims. (shrink)

This article offers a timely, critical analysis of the male gaze upon sportswomen in male Chinese fans’ consumption of sporting megaevents. We use the most popular Chinese-language sports fandom platform, Hupu, as the data repository and scrutinise the threads of male Hupu users’ postings about two elite sportswomen at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics as the case studies. Drawing on feminist critical discourse analysis (FCDA), we elucidate the discursive strategies that male Chinese fans adopt to sexualise sportswomen and trivialise their accomplishments. (...) The research findings showcase how China’s sports fandom has evolved as a masculine terrain, where men’s visions of asymmetrical gender power relations are discursively negotiated and rationalised. (shrink)

Employing the ideological square model (Van Dijk, 1998, 2000), this article examines polarization strategies of positive and negative representations of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in ideological discourse on the rise of China by Western media. We analyzed discourse properties in the narratives of five podcast episodes of the BBC World Service about the Chinese Dream, one episode each on Australia, Canada, India, Indonesia, and Kenya. The results revealed prevalent negative representations of ‘them’ – emphasizing negative characteristics and de-emphasizing positive ones of (...) China. However, discourse strategies of emphasizing positive characteristics about ‘us’ and de-emphasizing negative things about ‘us’ were only found in Australia and Canada. The podcasts hardly avoided discussing negative aspects of India, Indonesia, and Kenya. In doing so, the BBC’s ideological discourse excluded these countries from ‘us.’ Our study indicates that the ideological square approach is not only useful to elucidate discourses behind positive and negative representations of ‘us’ and ‘them’ but also can identify nuances in discursive construction of ‘us.’. (shrink)

The present paper analyses discursive representations and standpoint-arguments pairs, realized in articles of four mainstream Italian newspapers that report on migrants’ and refugees’ mobilization at the perceived peak of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’. We draw on the scholarly agenda of Critical Discourse Studies, employing tools from corpus linguistic perspectives, which allow us to generalize over the way in which the relevant minorities are represented in our corpus. Then, focusing on a smaller sample of negative representations, we outline a methodological synthesis (...) in order to scrutinize instances of representational meaning in newspapers articles and trace what is argumentatively inferred in discursive representations. To that end we exploit tools from systemic functional and cognitive linguistics as well as the Argumentum Model of Topics for the analysis of inference. In this sense, we demonstrate how discriminatory representations do not only portray migrants and refugees in a negative light but also justify discrimination through the argumentative dynamic they develop. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The objective behind the present article is two-fold. Firstly, departing from the assumption that distance and salience dynamics are key to both functioning and impact of the media, we aim to present a new theoretical perspective on social media discourse understood as both product and process – Media Proximization Approach – and thus shed light on the exploratory potential of Social Media Critical Discourse Studies paradigm. In J. Flowerdew, & J. E. Richardson, Handbook of Critical Discourse Analysis. Routledge) emphasizing (...) both the horizontal and vertical dimensions of digital communication. Secondly, identifying various dimensions of proximization within social media, we will discuss their role in creating a conducive environment for the spread of populist ideologies, and, more generally, changing the communication dynamics between the primary and secondary definers. Data-wise, the article focuses on current social media discursive practices concerning Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in the context of rising anti-immigration sentiment and Brexit campaign. Two YouTube videos recontextualizing the speech along with the accompanying comments will be discussed here to show how political discourses get remediated in social media where their ‘prosumers’ imbue them with new form, function and emotionality. (shrink)

Narratives are everywhere. We tell narratives about ourselves and we make the world meaningful through storytelling. We position others through the narratives we tell and are positioned by stories told about us. And yet, while narratives have, of course, been analysed in critical discourse studies (CDS), including in one of its most popular approaches, the discourse-historical approach (DHA), this article proposes to go a step further by systematically integrating the concept of narrative into the core of the DHA. More specifically, (...) I consider narrative from the perspective of the concept of narrative genre. That is, I propose a focus on how meaning arises via the narrative genres of romance, tragedy, comedy and irony, i.e. through (modes of) emplotment. Such an integration does not contradict the DHA’s (and CDS’) focus on detailed textual analysis or reject existing foci, e.g. on argumentation, but recognises the centrality of the narrative form for social life and offers further concepts for empirical analyses. This focus on narrative genre contributes, furthermore, to the critical study of meaning-making by revising Jürgen Habermas’ Critical Theory and offering a novel integration of the latter into the DHA, thus providing a theoretically justified, immanent foundation for its critique. (shrink)

This paper proposes a methodological synthesis in order to study multimodal media discourse and argumentation in the context of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in Greece. It follows the framework of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, integrating this with argumentation studies, with a particular emphasis on the analysis of inference. Our data come from the Greek newspapers Kathimerini and Ta Nea. We contend that the proposed methodological synergy enables scrutiny of (a) racist conceptualizations cultivated by the representation of migrants and refugees in (...) headlines and photographs in newspaper articles along with (b) the argumentative potential that is implicitly sustained in these multimodal representations. (shrink)

ABSTRACTDiscourse analysis can reveal what texts leave out, and how texts transform and evaluate the social realities they represent but critical discourse analysis must also evaluate the findings of discourse analysis, and, this paper argues, this cannot be done on discourse-internal grounds alone.To develop this argument, the paper will first discuss how critical discourse analysts might establish whether misrepresentations have taken place, and then how they might assess whether such misrepresentations legitimate and promote unacceptable forms of inequality, in other words, (...) how discourses might be morally evaluated. Special reference is made to the issue of ‘marriage equality’ as it has recently played out in Australia. (shrink)

ABSTRACTA common strategy in media communication on climate change is to tailor messages to the existing values of specific target audiences in order to make climate change mitigation attractive to them. The question how such field-specific messages are oriented towards the reality of climate change, however, is often neglected. As an alternative to the common framing approaches to media communication on climate change, this paper advances a discursive and semiotic perspective that takes the epistemological position of a constructivist realism with (...) C.S. Peirce and focuses on the way the abstract object of climate change is represented and transformed in media discourse. With a methodological framework of multimodal critical discourse analysis, which builds on the discourse-historical approach and investigates different discursive strategies, the field-specific representation of climate change in two factual television programmes is critically analysed and the effects of an sufficient orientation towards the object of climate change are discussed. (shrink)

ABSTRACT he paper examines the digital practices and discourses of the Islamic State when exploiting Social Media Communication environments to propagate their jihadist ideology and mobilise specific audiences. It draws on insights from Social Media Critical Discourse Studies, observational approaches, and visual content/semiotic analysis. The paper maintains the complementary nature of technological practice and discursive content in the process of meaning-making in digital jihadist discourse. The study shows that digital practices of strategic sharing, distribution and campaigns to re-upload textual materials (...) are made possible by exploiting SMC communicative affordances. As for the analysis of discursive content, the paper focuses on YouTube and highlights strategic patterns and covert references in an IS-produced flagship video. It illustrates how IS discourse constructs its envisaged in-group/outgroup by symbolising current events within historical, political and ideological conflict scenarios, i.e. the incessant resistance and legitimacy of forces of virtue vs evil. By foregrounding symbolic references to military outgroup actors, IS legitimises its own violence and projects a powerful self-identity against a global hegemony. The paper shows how the combination of a technologically savvy operation and a resistant, anti-hegemonic narrative, embedded in a strategically framed symbolism of Islam, may resonate with global -diasporic digital consumers. (shrink)

This study examines specifically, the mission statement and ideology as discursive practices of the Mavrodi Mondial Moneybox (MMM) Ponzi scheme. As the demand for transparency in governance, public and private practices increase, there is also a rising proliferation of counter forms of transparency in financial sectors. While studies have focused on the practices of transparency in the reports of public and private institutions, very little attention has been paid to the perils of transparency in mission statements of online scam practices (...) such as Ponzi schemes that parade as transparent financial schemes. Using a critical discourse analytic approach, this study investigates Ponzi schemes in Nigeria and their ideology of a ‘transparent economic system’. These schemes claim to operate a mutual benefit fund for the poor and discourage individuals from investing in banks. The critical discourse analysis draws attention to masked discourses of MMM and examines how the transparent discourse of the MMM generally constitutes deceptive discourse. The findings of the study reveal that factual and political arguments and propagandas are strategies of negative other representation that attempt to discredit the government and other legitimate financial institutions and at the same time attempt to control the mind of the participants by presenting the schemes as reliable thereby defrauding their victims. (shrink)

In this article, we present a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of the online discussion board posts of a group of elementary educators as they discussed their interpretations of four historical timelines that presented different – sometimes complementary and sometimes contradictory – information about the goals of the Lewis & Clark expedition and its effects on Native populations. This activity was one part of a virtual professional development course on anti-racist critical literacy pedagogy for K-8 teachers, which was structured around three (...) key concepts: 1) considering multiple perspectives can disrupt common understandings of texts; 2) issues of power determine what is present and absent in the stories authors tell; and 3) texts are social constructions that can be deconstructed and reconstructed. The teachers featured in this article worked in the same urban district and throughout their discussion, we found that they perpetuated discourses of Whiteness while simultaneously attempting to disrupt them. However, we also found discursive reconstructive potential in the ways one teacher responded to her assumptions being interrupted by a course facilitator, as well as the value of using CDA to examine teacher language. Our findings point to further directions for teacher educators working to foster racial and critical literacy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The ongoing Sino-U.S. trade dispute between the world’s two largest economies has since 2018 attracted much attention from the international media. This study used the approach of corpus-assisted discourse studies to compare how leading English-language newspapers from each side—The New York Times and China Daily — discursively constructed this issue. The findings indicated that while NYT tended to profile the trade conflict as a ‘war’ in line with mainstream hard-line ideologies that emphasize China’s presumed threat to national security of (...) the U.S., CD sought to dial down the rhetoric and showed a preference for defining the matter as a ‘friction’, consistent with the tenet of ‘pragmatic nationalism’ endorsed by the Communist Party of China. Accordingly, the two newspapers framed the causes, moral evaluation/consequences, and treatment of the issue in congruence with their respective dominant metaphors by means of various linguistic patterns. These differences are interpreted with regard to each side’s underlying ideologies and national interests. (shrink)

Using narrative (genre) analysis, part of the discourse historical approach (DHA) to critical discourse studies (CDS), this paper analyses discursive struggles in the Tunisian context of constitutional reform debates held in 2022. This methodological approach and political focus are then tied to the distinctly Tunisian concept of ‘asabiyya, a notion expressing forms of social solidarity/cohesion as devised by Tunisian philosopher of history Ibn Khaldūn (d.1406). The in-depth narrative genre analysis reveals the prevalence of the ironic-tragic modes of emplotment deployed by (...) reform advocates aiming to subvert the totalizing discourses of the heroic romantic narratives, which are preferred by constitutional conservatives. The paper concludes by discussing the possible reasons for the prevalence of the nation-state as the master narrative in these disputes and the failure of ironic-tragic narratives to mobilize influential forms of ‘asabiyya during the constitutional struggles. The paper empirically contributes to understanding the processes of facilitated or blocked social change in post-Arab Spring societies. (shrink)

Although critical discourse analysis (CDA) sets out to investigate both oppressive and progressive discourses, the vast bulk of published studies seem to prioritize the former. This paper is a response to scholarly calls to engage with (non)oppressive discourses by integrating positive impulses in critical discourse analysis, and thus contribute to the growth of positive discourse analysis (PDA), a complement to CDA, which attends to the emancipatory mechanisms of resistance. Using a combination of theoretical tools, this paper takes a case study (...) approach to explore the potentials of ‘complexification’ [Macgilchrist, F. (2007). Positive discourse analysis: Contesting dominant discourses by reframing the issues. Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines, 1(1), 74–94], a counter-discursive strategy for propelling marginal discourses into the dominant official school discourse. Specifically, the paper discusses three layers of complexification found in a selected Moroccan EFL textbook which has been developed, approved and distributed by the Moroccan Ministry of Education, and has been required to be used in every school, public or private. The analysis highlights the role this textbook plays in promoting emancipatory and progressive discourses about Amazigh social actors, and hence, signals a new shift in analytic focus by illuminating a concrete application of PDA in education curricula. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn 2013, ex-National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden shocked the world by revealing the American NSA’s extensive surveillance programs. The ensuing media discussion became a focal point for the justification and contestation of surveillance in the digital age. This article contributes to the growing body of literature on the discursive construction of surveillance, concentrating on how the practice is legitimized. Methodologically, the paper draws on Critical Discourse Studies, applying the concept of discourse and utilizing insights from Van Leeuwen’s categories of (...) legitimation and social actor representation. The data come from the media coverage of the Snowden affair in Finland, whose hitherto very limited state surveillance is now being transformed into extensive digital monitoring. The study concludes that surveillance is legitimized through two main discourses, one legitimizing it by constructing it as a tool for protection against terrorism, the other contesting it by depicting it as a threat to the basic building blocks of democracy. The study suggests that the latter understanding tends to be favored in the media, but the critique of surveillance is on a rather abstract level. (shrink)

Contemporary public discourses are, despite the growing array of technologies and spaces for participation, becoming increasingly characterized by polarization – the formation of two distinct and r...

1. To Iranian Shi’as, practices of religious rituals to glorify the Prophet Muhammad's dynasty and mourn for the death of Imams are regarded as a time for sorrow, respect for the dead, a time for s...

ABSTRACT Using the example of the Twitter feed #MeToo, this paper argues that CDS, in its task to understand more about how social media can offer ways for voices to challenge ideologies from below, needs to explore the ideas of ‘nodes’. Right wing populism in the west: Social media discourse and echo chambers. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/majid_khosravinik/publications) and ‘echo chambers’ in greater detail. Though #MeToo did provide an ideological challenge, I show how it is also discursively chaotic and partly driven by influencers who (...) may have a range of other motivations to align with the moral capital in the feed. At another level, #MeToo is highly nodal in terms of affect and moral conviction. These features can be understood in regard to nodal power of affective connectivity. Affective publics and structure of storytelling: Sentiment, events and mediality. Information, Communication and Society, 19, 307–324. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2015.1109697) and also in terms of major shifts in accepted norms of debating politics and society driven by social media. I consider what this means for CDS in relation to identifying discourses and discovering ideology in the social media landscape. (shrink)

This paper draws attention to the significance of incorporating decolonial methodologies in analyzing political discourse in a postcolonial world, particularly in Africa. The decolonial approach to political discourse focuses on the ways politics in postcolonial context is imbricated in the logic of coloniality. Decolonial approach is considered necessary rather than sufficient in interrogating the hegemonic structure of colonialism in Africa's political discourse. The paper uses critical discourse analysis situated within decolonial methodologies to analyze former President of Nigeria, Goodluck Jonathan's declaration-of-intent (...) speech to seek re-election. The paper specifically draws on [Mignolo, W. (2011). The darker side of western modernity: Global futures decolonial options. Duke University Press.] and [Macgilchrist, F. (2014). Media discourse and de/coloniality: A post-foundational approach. In C. Hart & P. Cap (Eds.), Contemporary critical discourse studies (pp. 385–405). Bloomsbury Publishing] decolonial frameworks and [Chilton, P. (2004). Analysing political discourse. Routledge] legitimization model. Situating decolonial approaches together with Chilton's legitimization model is, on the one hand, a way of interrogating hegemonic structures in Goodluck Jonathan's speech and on the other hand works to show the limitation of Chilton's theory in analyzing discourses from Africa. This limitation of Chilton's model underscores the need to bring decolonial approaches in constructing a nuanced understanding of Africa and its epistemic diversity because it is impossible to think of overcoming the coloniality of power without approaching it from the perspective of the colonized. (shrink)

1. There have been growing concerns from international scholars and relevant stakeholders over enhancing the quality of teaching and learning in higher education (HE) owing to its remarkable boom a...

When governments introduce controversial policies that many citizens disapprove of, officeholders increasingly use discursive legitimation strategies in their public communication to ward off blame. In this paper, we contribute to the study of blame avoidance in government social media communication by exploring how corpus-assisted discourse analysis helps to identify three types of common legitimations: self-defensive appeals to personal authority of policymakers, impersonal authority of rules or documents and goals or effects of policies. We use a specialised corpus of tweets by (...) the Brexit department of the British government which we analyse both qualitatively and quantitatively. We demonstrate how the analysis of lexical bundles that characterise each type of legitimation might provide a new avenue for identifying the presence, characteristics and uses of these legitimations in larger datasets. (shrink)

This study draws on a synergy of Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Studies to scrutinize the portrayal of hackers in China Daily and The New York Times in the 21st century, primarily revolving around the main social actors and targets in hacking. This study demonstrates that both media share a positive transformation of the image-building of hackers in the 21st century. Besides, countries are salient social actors in hacker media discourse and the two media differ in their ways of constructing (...) them. The New York Times tends to have a negative other-representation and categorical otherness of specific countries through such discursive strategies as negative other-representation and group categorization, whereas China Daily is prone to insist on opposing the US hacking allegations in a defensive manner. Regarding major targets, China Daily highlights government websites whereas The New York Times emphasizes government websites, officials’ emails, large technology companies, and election infrastructure. The analysis shows that the two media’s different ways of framing hackers are underpinned by the ideologies behind them and the Chinese and US socio-political landscapes. This study can provide insights into how hacker discourse in media is represented in the 21st century and how national identities are constructed in the media representations of hackers. (shrink)

Volume 17, Issue 5, November 2020, Page 527-544.

This paper explores how national socialist aesthetics and semiotics are regimented within the Swedish Nazi milieu today. In order to treat fascism as contemporary ideology, the article applies intertextuality and provenance as analytical concepts in the analysis of how Nazism is re-emerging discursively. The analysis contributes unique insights, as the dataset consists of extremist discourse aimed at providing members of the most prominent Swedish Nazi movement with guidance on how to embody and express national socialism in their everyday lives. The (...) analysis reveals that common-sense notions about ‘a natural life’ and mainstream aesthetics concerning an outdoor lifestyle emerge as central expressions of a ‘natural’ and ‘healthy’ embodiment of national socialism. This aesthetic finds its ideological motive in opposition to a ‘sick’, ‘Jewish’ and ‘parasitical’ way of living. Mainstream notions are thus turned into vehicles for political extremism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The present study features an interview between a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officer and a female indigenous minor, who was reporting her own sexual assault. The study highlights how the child's interview with the officer appears to include gender-specific judgements. Thus far, few critical studies, underscoring interview techniques, feature power relations and ideologies in the discourse. This study identifies police negotiation with female assault complainants as discursive Yentling. Inspired by the term Yentl syndrome, where female health is often (...) underappreciated because it is judged from male prerogatives, the present study proposes that discursive Yentling emerges from victim blaming, perpetrator mitigation, and the sexualization of rape. Drawing attention to transcripts of an RCMP interview with a child complainant, this study asks (1) what power relations and ideologies manifest in the dialogue between the officer and the complainant? (2) Do the findings give evidence for discursive Yentling? Transitivity analysis and a discourse historical approach reveal ideological predispositions towards the complainant during the interview. The implications for this study hopefully provoke more considered police interview techniques for potential victims of sexual assault and inculcate a culture of feminist understanding in Canadian public services. (shrink)

This article explores the putative addressee in the persuasion of diplomatic discourse by adopting White’s recent proposals as to putative reader/addressee positioning to specifically examine China’s communication efforts through South African English-language newspapers in the Xi Jinping era. Likemindedness is found to be predominantly construed, meticulously balanced with relative frequent construal of uncommittedness and very rare construal of un-likemindedness. And a set of 12 interrelated discourses are identified as fundamental ideological tenets in legitimating China’s African engagement and its vision of (...) world order. Findings show that the classical political discursive strategy of Us/them polarization is typically deployed. The analysis and discussion illustrates how White’s proposed framework can be systematically applied to offer new lines of analysis of persuasion and shed some light on understanding contemporary Chinese diplomatic discourse. (shrink)

This paper contributes to feminist debates on cohabitation by studying judicial discourse after legal reform. It examines how Canadian judges speak about cohabitation and decide whether cohabitants qualify as “spouses” for the purposes of property sharing. Judges assess cohabitants against an ideal of companionate marriage with gendered and class overtones. A contrasting tendency is to disavow moral judgments by declaring openness to a diversity of relationships. It seems difficult to operationalize cohabitation as a relationship form distinct from marriage. Indeed, the (...) cases undermine assertions that reform makes married couples and cohabitants equal. Efforts to “modernize” family law appear to give new life to traditional ideals of the good marriage. (shrink)

This study explores discursive bridges in a new way, with the aim of presenting a methodological tool for the analysis of meaning shifts. This tool is within the socio-hermeneutical current, whose purpose is the sociological analysis of discourses and their social contexts. Within this current, the analysis of discursive bridges can be a valid methodology for the analysis of conflicts or social and ideological tensions in which speakers tend to ramify or displace the chains of meaning in their discourses that (...) are based on common words or expressions. This study first addresses the theory of the main dimensions of discursive bridges, secondly it positions the analysis of discursive bridges within the socio-hermeneutical current and discusses the basic research criteria and finishes with an example of empirical research of a discursive bridge. (shrink)

The expression ‘Fake News’ inside Internet memes engenders significant online virulence, possibly heralding an iconoclastic emergence of weaponized propaganda for assaulting agencies reared on public trust. Internet memes are multimodal artifacts featuring ideological singularities designed for ‘flash’ consumption, often composed by numerous voices echoing popular, online culture. This study proposes that ‘Fake News’ Internet memes are weaponized iconoclastic multimodal propaganda discourse and attempts to delineate them as such by asking: What power relations and ideologies do Internet memes featuring the expression (...) ‘fake news’ harbor? How might those manifestations qualify as WIMP discourse? A multimodal critical discourse analysis of a small pool of ‘fake news’ Internet memes drawn from four popular social media websites revealed what agencies were often targeted and from what political canons they likely emerged. Findings indicate that many Internet memes featuring ‘fake news’ are specifically directed, revealing an underlying hazard that WIMP discourse could diminish democratic processes while influencing online trajectories of public discourse. (shrink)

This paper examines the ways in which the group of people now known as the Windrush generation, who moved to the UK in the period 1948–1971, have been represented in public discourse. This group has been adversely affected by the current ‘hostile environment’ policy in the UK regarding immigration. As I show, in the ensuing and highly critical debate, the government repeatedly positioned them as ‘good’ migrants and placed them in a binary opposition with ‘undesirable’ migrants, who they cite as (...) the intended target of their policy. Using diachronic corpora of parliamentary debates and national media, I compare this contemporary rhetoric with (a) Windrush representations in the 1940s and 1950s, and (b) contemporary representation of those the government constructs as unwanted migrants. Taking metaphor as a key for the comparison I show that there is very little continuity or overlap in how the Windrush migrants were discussed at the time of their arrival and in the current period. Instead, there is a much greater proximity in the past representations of the Windrush migrants and the current representations of ‘undesirable’ migrants. This mismatch in actual and perceived representation at the time of arrival indicates how nostalgia functions in migration discourses, even facilitating anti-immigration arguments. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn Critical Discourse Studies and in other linguistics oriented scholarly journals we now see more research which draws upon multimodality as part of carrying out analyses of how text...

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a continuously developing and problem-oriented interdisciplinary research field. It is interested in ‘analyzing hidden, opaque, and visible structures of domina...

While the mainstreaming of the far right is attracting growing scholarly interest based on its contemporary relevance, the role that far-right self-representation strategies play in this process has seen limited engagement. In this article, we argue that far-right actors employ a post-fascist logic to bring their ideas closer to the mainstream. This logic rests on a dual message, whereby they attempt to outwardly distance themselves from fascism while at the same time recontextualising fascist ideas. To explore these dynamics, we use (...) a mixed-methods approach to discourse analysis to examine far-right social media posts during the 2022 Italian general election. Taking all Facebook, Instagram and Twitter posts during the official campaigning period from the party and leader accounts of Lega per Salvini Premier and Fratelli d’Italia, we explored articulations of the post-fascist dyad within this context. Our findings underscore how both far-right parties ridiculed accusations of fascism and depicted themselves as ‘centre-right’, yet they commonly used fascist dog-whistles and violent anti-immigration discourse to construct a broader conspiracy narrative and portray themselves as Italy's saviour. While Italy proves a paradigmatic case, this research has wider implications for the need to explore the relationship between self-representation and mainstreaming. (shrink)

When governments introduce controversial policies or face a risk of policy failure, officeholders try to avoid blame and justify their decisions by using various legitimation strategies. This paper focuses on the ways in which legitimations are expressed in government social media communication, using the Twitter posts of the British government’s Brexit department as an example. We show how governments may seek legitimacy by appealing to (1) the personal authority of individual policymakers, (2) the collective authority of (political) organisations, (3) the (...) impersonal authority of rules or documents, (4) the goals or effects of government policy, (5) ‘the will of the people’, and (6) time pressure. The results suggest that official legitimations in social media posts tend to rely more on references to authority and shared values rather than presentation of evidence and sound arguments. (shrink)

In cultural as well as social science studies of discourses (e.g. of discourses on climate change), the concept of narrative is used in a very broad sense – as an umbrella term that lacks analytical accuracy. From the perspective of linguistics, it seems obvious to acknowledge five elementary generic patterns. In addition to narration, linguists differentiate between argumentation, description, explication and instruction. Each of these patterns fulfils a different basic pragmatic function. This article tries to make clear and justify why (...) it is important, both theoretically and practically, to make a distinction between these five generic patterns. It is argued and shown that narrativization tends to go hand in hand with a relief of action, historicization, potential fictionalization, subjectivization and relativization. With respect to discourses on the climate crisis, these prototypical characteristics of narratives undermine both scientific attempts to justify claims of truth relating to the existence, causes and consequences of global warming as well as practical attempts to motivate people to adopt a more sustainable lifestyle. (shrink)

A recent trend in policy responses the rising public resentments with inequality is to prod the wealthy into spending a fraction of their profits on projects that promote social welfare. Legitimati...

Despite claims of ‘evidence based policy’, the place of empirical evidence in family law reform is ambiguous. There is ongoing socio-legal analysis of the differential value and uses of quantitative data and anecdote in detailing women’s experiences and advocating for change. In this paper, we engage with these issues through a focus on how data were constructed in a key government report, Every Picture Tells a Story, which was used to officially define the problem and outline recommendations in the controversial (...) 2006-08 reform of the Australian Child Support Scheme. Our discussion focuses on two questions: what legitimacy is accorded to different kinds of evidence in family law reform processes?; and, how is this legitimacy gendered? We applied feminist critical discourse analysis to the type, source and claims of the data included in the child support chapter of the report. Our findings indicate that both quantitative data and anecdote were used to privilege fathers’ financial interests and autonomy; in contrast, women’s voices and interests were marginalised. Thus, we argue the legitimacy of data is ascribed through its relationship to the gendered definition of the ‘problems’ of child support, rather than the type of data per se. (shrink)

From princesses who free princes to journalists who tell stories about natural catastrophes and, most generally, individual and collective actors who make sense of the world, narratives are everywh...

In recent years, aging coal power plants, lack of maintenance, and issues of poor governance have resulted in a high frequency of rolling scheduled blackouts, throughout South Africa. This has led to greater urgency being placed on switching to renewable energy sources, which South Africa has great potential for. Despite this, and the current reality of the global climate crisis, South Africa continues to rely heavily on coal, not only as an energy source at home, but also as a key (...) part of the country’s export economy. This paper utilises a corpus-assisted, ecolinguistically-informed critical discourse analysis framework to investigate the ways in which members of the South African national government construct the use of coal and other fossil fuels in light of a global climate crisis. The data for this paper consists of a variety of public-facing texts from the South African national government on the topic of climate change. Our analysis revealed that despite a stated commitment to prioritising renewable energy by the government, its implicit messaging normalises the continued use of fossil fuels and minimises their serious negative impacts. (shrink)

This article argues that phenomenological sociology has great potential to provide a strong theoretical support to the Sociocognitive Approach in Critical Discourse Studies. SCA is interested in the interconnections between knowledge, discourse and society while placing subjectivity in the centre of its framework. It looks into the correlative relationship between personal- and socially shared knowledge, and the significance of these correlations to discourse production and interpretation. Analogously, phenomenological sociology explores the interrelated structures of subjectivity, knowledge and the social world. It (...) systematically analyses the conditions and forms of intersubjective understanding and the mutually constitutive relationship between subjective- and objective knowledge. Given the considerable overlap between the subject matter of phenomenological sociology and that of SCA, the purpose of the article is to draw the attention of critical discourse analysts to a neglected but extremely resourceful field. Following a brief introduction to SCA, the article will address some of SCA’s key concepts in conjunction with the phenomenological-sociological insight. (shrink)